Daily Archives: Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Spawned from geeky twitter conversations that pit famous fantasy characters in a battle to the death, Suvudu has created a full-fledged Cage Match bracket to determine, once and for all, the biggest badass in the genre.

Suvudu was kind enough to contact me and extend me the responsibility of handling two of the fights. With tongue firmly in cheek, I came up with profiles, special attacks and a predicted outcome, written in the form of a quick story. I hope you’ll have as much fun reading my scenarios as I had writing them. I’ve already managed to piss off a large contingent of Terry Goodkind fans…. Oops.

Trust your readers to be as smart as you are, but don’t assume they can read your mind.

Narrators aren’t evil, nor are they sinless. Tell the story in a voice, but not about the voice.

Get out of the way. The more I use fiction to show everyone how clever I am, the more I compromise my story.

As with any list of ‘rules’, one must always approach them with a grain of salt and take only what is useful to them as a writer. Still, given my penchant for Abraham’s writing, there’s certainly an amount of wisdom to be found in his advice.